Thursday, 8 September 2016

The long-term feud between Spanish coach, Pep Guardiola and Swedish striker - Zlatan Ibrahimovic is set to be renewed in a heated premier league clash between the Manchester City and Manchester United.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Pep Guardiola come together on Saturday in the Manchester derby six years on from an acrimonious 12 months as an unbalanced pairing at Barcelona and their relationship has never healed.

The enigmatic striker, now of Manchester United, sees his former manager as a ‘spineless coward’,the opposite of now-boss Jose Mourinho.

At Old Trafford this weekend both will be desperate to get one over on Guardiola and City.

‘If Mourinho brightens up the room, Guardiola pulls down the curtains,’ Ibrahimovic wrote in his 2013 autobiography I Am Zlatan.

The Spaniard has kept quieter on the subject of his former £40million centre forward but the way City’s interest in Ibrahimovic that peaked in 2010 has evaporated was enough recognition of the feud between the pair.

This weekend’s Manchester derby sees that bad blood resurface for the seventh time since the separation that was effectively sealed by a Champions League semi-final exit at the hands of Mourinho’s Inter Milan.

Ibrahimovic said:

‘I yelled: “You haven’t got any balls!” and worse than that I added: “You can go to hell!”‘I completely lost it, and you might have expected Guardiola to say a few words in response, but he’s a spineless coward. He just picked up the metal box, like a little caretaker, and then left, never to mention it again, not a word.’It was a night of arguably the greatest of Mourinho’s victories over Guardiola and one that sealed Ibrahimovic’s thinking that Pep was not the man for him. His boss already held a similar view.

When Barcelona spent £40m plus the exchange of Samuel Eto’o to take Ibrahimovic from Inter in 2009, the egos of manager and player collided.

Guardiola was looking to replace the outspoken Eto’o and somehow thought the right idea was to approach Ibrahimovic,rarely one to mince his words. Former AC Milan tactician Arrigo Sacchi warned the manager ahead of time that it was the wrong move but he did not listen.